"lines on my face, tears in my eyes, words in between my lips: a life unfolds"—-Secrets|Letters to Sylvia
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.
Life After God, Douglas Coupland
“…there are clouds in these dreams and i am flying hard between ashes,
did you not get burned at stakes?
there are words in these dreams but I am not one saying them,
to swallow alone is pain. to breathe, a sin.
not one word out but here are letters for when you wake up,
she said, you will tell them how to say it out loud,
even with tears in their eyes. tell them.
and so I write.”
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Right before our parting, mother sat me down in a meadow. She apologetically held my hands then placed a flower crown on my hair.
She said, “Remember this, love, for time is a loop. You will come back for me.”
Little did she know, time was in denial.
So suddenly as I realised this, she turned into a montage of old photographs between flashing lights.
I saw her,
the staggering girl between
dark webs,
I saw her vague fingers inside
his feathered glory,
such indifferent beak cloud,
white rush oh there there
brute brute blood!
here’s burning roof and tower
the centre cannot hold,
things fall apart…
____
Phrases in W. B. Yeats’ poems “Leda and the Swan” and “The Second Coming”, in this part of my book, are rearranged in an attempt of deconstruction. WB Yeats poems are an integral and essential part of my book, When I, My Own Daughter, available here.
Photo Credit: Alessio Albi
…But death, death was real. She and mother, they made a promise to see each other. They waited patiently and then the one day, that one day she’d knock on her door and not the other way around.
She never counted me in.
In her stories it was always her that was lost (and found), but never me. I was always here and there, existed in static equilibrium, already defined, captured.
She was the one who decides where to go with her words. She was, to me, knowledge and ignorance, forgiveness and revenge, all in one.
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i’ve been carving memories on dry walls
four seasons of loneliness and you came bearing your own
stories of a little girl named Lara
her face her smile her every breath you inhale her
a picture perfect deep into your soul
she exists to you in ways that I could not
she has a smile that’s similar to mine, you said
her hair is golden like the sun,
this little ballerina and her pink tutu
and when she cries you cup her tears in your palms letting
them soak into the lines of your hands that once
a fortune teller told you, you wouldn’t make it to forty,
that you would be entangled in a story like none other
she said I would write them for you so daddy’s little girl
could forever lives in rhymes…
in bedtime stories and lullabies…
a raft of hope floating at sea
but the water knows loneliness too well
and how you and i swim deep into changing currents
oh how we used to row row our boat roughly
to the unseen… and so i hurl my heart
i’d stay drowned so the water will feel me
and consume me, aren’t we all
liquids with cold cold hearts,
should we not come home already
dust to dust?
but the sun oh the sun comes
and how i long to bob out and float
and sway with the waves, they’ll find you
the wind whispers
what are we without the ocean?
who are we without this distance?
…because first and foremost, before anything else, I am me.
It was a bad day and I could not spend any more hours sitting in my car in the parking lot before classes. I took two girls out to a late lunch that day and told them: in a distant past, I did a very bad thing and I haven’t been able to move on from it.
They didn’t ask questions, they just sat there with me, eating.
That day I decided, I was going to quit my job.
Resigning from an established institution was a torture. Convincing your superiors that they could easily let me go, that there will be someone else, and they might be a lot better doing what I was doing, is. a. torture. Of course they wouldn’t let me go. They offered me positions, new spaces, new title. New office in the city. They were tempting. I could hear my younger ambitious self screaming loud inside my ears.
Who wouldn’t want to be part of an Ivy League team, sitting in that ivory tower, judging everyone while at the same time being inspiration to a lot of people? Never have I ever in my life been treated better than when I had that title. It followed me everywhere and gave me the privilege my parents wanted me to have. I finally lived up to their expectation, being the trophy kid all my life, ignoring all stabbing knives on my back while smiling in front of hundreds of audience, hoping they would gain some kind of wisdom at the end of the day. What a time to be alive.
But I needed a good cry. I needed to hear music again. Someone just wrote a song for me, about how wonderful I was when I was none other than who I truly am. I needed to cry. Not in-the-shower cry. Not the kind I had before I went to sleep. Nor crying screaming into a pillow. Not that kind of cry.
I needed to go somewhere far, and shed that single tear, and meet me again.
It’s been, well, different ever since. Different. Living your true self is a struggle when obviously it’s a lot easier to portray what everyone thinks of you. So I cut everyone lose and let them go. Appointments, canceled. Contacts, blocked. Social media, deleted. Said goodbye without them knowing, or aware if it. I just wanted to be me.
Why is it so hard to be alone these days? Why wouldn’t you? I want to. I want to be alone, just me, by myself – to be able to finally breathe. Life is so precious, you wouldn’t want living hating it. It’s why I did what I did.
Let me tell you about time: it doesn’t heal, it goes on. It changes you into different people and when you are in a different place, you see different things -and if you’re lucky enough, you see things differently (you might write about it too).
And that is it. There’s nothing about healing has anything to do with how time stretches between you and your wounds. They will always be there to remind you where you’re coming from.
My book went live few hours ago and everytime it always came down to this feeling of helplessness in letting go. And that is the only healing I could ever get from writing it.
Life always, always, gets you caught off guard and I am spent.
If words were breath and phrases life… I am rarely moved by other peoples’ poetry. It takes a truly unique writer to penetrate below my natural cynicism. I tell you all: this is the one book of poetry, the first in a long time, to feel authentic, brave and sincere. I LOVE THIS BOOK!
(Martha Humphreys, Amazon.com)
Within these pieces, you will find so much raw emotion and talent. The ink on these pages will soak into your skin and claw into your skull. You will never forget reading such a powerful book. Maia is destined for greatness.
(Anonymous, Amazon.com)
How do you describe a book as an experience? Letters to Sylvia is not just flattery words knitted together in a string of poems. It is a journey you want and need to embark. It is a sigh at the end not wanting to get off that plane of emotions. This is not just a book. It’s an experience. Read, woman!
(Anonymous, Amazon.co.uk)
This book was just like one of those Sunday afternoons when you just don’t want to do nothing but sit down and take a walk down the memory lane. This book reeks of nostalgia and heartbreak. My personal favourites were Period ( this one left me gutted and awestruck), Adieu ( made me sigh) and Feminine Mystique ( this one BROKE MY HEART). And I loved the fact that the poet somehow wrote it as an ode/ dedication to Sylvia, my all time favourite. The only thing that I would like to change would be the fact that it was just 85 pages long. I absolutely loved the tone and the flow so I guess I would’ve loved it a tad bit more if it included a few more poems!
(Mariah, Goodreads.com)
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Dear friends, lovers, and followers,
I might just revive this blog again. For recently I decided to come out of the closet and admit I am in fact, an author. A famous figure once said, I forgot who, sudden amnesia attack here, that if you go to sleep thinking about writing and waking up thinking about writing, then you are a writer. And I did. I do. For the last twenty years of my life I have been thinking of every lost word on that way to campus, when I was teaching, or in a meeting, when I was in the shower, and the minutes I woke up at night. I got poems in my head while I was asleep. It’s clear to see, to feel, I am a writer and always has been.
So I quit my job and decided to travel and write. I’m the happiest.
